From Clayton Dillard's introduction to Slant Magazine's Top 25 Films of 2016: “Celebrating great art amid the transition to political catastrophe can feel like, to paraphrase the title of poet Ocean Vuong's recent collection, a moonlit sky with exit wounds. But the phlegm of post-truths shouldn't get caught in our throats, let alone our eyes and ears, because films from across the globe continue to present a portrait of resilience in the face of international turmoil.” Click here to read the feature and see if your favorite films of the year made our list. And see below for a list of the films that just missed making it onto our list, followed by our contributors' individual ballots. Happy reading.

So many of the highlights and lowlights of the year in singles were, for better or worse, attuned to what feels like a worldwide drift toward maintaining one's own financial and psychological (same diff) bottom line at the expense of anyone else's. Beyoncé, of all performers, was far from immune, though her particular brand of exceptionalism continues to dress itself up in the finery of collective consciousness raising. Far more common were the unfussy, ruthlessly entertaining likes of Fifth Harmony speaking on behalf of Melania Trumps everywhere. Or Kanye West's epic clapback against Taylor Swift, which in turn presaged his detour into the mental hospital, which we've now seen firsthand more or less counts as the first step in a presidential bid in 2020.

Whatever the forbidding stature of his work, Béla Tarr was the epitome of grace during a roundtable discussion at this year's Marrakech International Film Festival. At the end, he even acknowledged that he knows “the roundtable is the most horrible thing for a film journalist.” Tarr is president of the jury at this year's festival, which means mandatory morning viewings of each film in competition—and, if the rumors are true, much behind-closed-door deliberation. (Neither the festival's assembled press nor its publicists have quite recovered from the shockwaves of Francis Ford Coppola's landmark decision to grant last year's jury prize to “cinema itself.”) Three days into this year's festival, Tarr played it close to the vest, preferring to discuss his post-retirement career at the Sarajevo Film Academy's film.factory—which sounds like heaven for cinephiles—and why, even if he's no longer directing features, he's far from finished with the “drug” of filmmaking.

The Hitchockian opening scene of tonight's episode of The Walking Dead, “Sing Me a Song,” makes clever use of Michonne's (Danai Gurira) inscrutability. Walking down an initially empty country road and whistling “The Farmer in the Dell” to attract her prey, Michonne is the epitome of the existentially alone western hero she personifies more than anyone else in Rick's group as she sets a walker-lined trap whose purpose is disturbingly opaque. The close-up of the sword and walkie-talkie she leaves behind as she drags a body down the road is a particularly unsettling bit of misdirection: Is she planning to commit suicide by walker? And even if she's doing something else, like setting things up to make it look as if walkers got her so she can go underground, how long can she survive without that sword?

Finding the crux of a Pedro Almodóvar film is not unlike asking how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. In each case, the supposed science of the issue at hand is often short-circuited by impatience. Lest the comparison seem too glib, Almodóvar's entire filmography is, to varying degrees, about the performance of taste, where characters often relate to one another not through their minds, but through their fingers, eyes, and teeth. Sweet tooths are more than a matter of dental hygiene; they're a means of defining personal placement within the broader spectrum of vivid characters and self-serving interests. The bright color scheme of Almodóvar's mise-en-scène redoubles these matters by problematizing realism as a dissenting faction amid otherwise psychologically defined characters, whose motivations are typically for sustenance of a rather short-order sort. On that note, Almodóvar's oeuvre, and the characters that comprise it, can perhaps be best summarized by Carmen Maura's character in Matador, who says near the film's end: “Some things are beyond reason. This is one of them.”

The beginning of “Swear” echoes the ending of “Go Getters,” in which Jesus and Carl exchanged a long look in the back of the Savior truck they'd separately boarded, in a faceoff between the old and new world order. This time, Cyndie (Sydney Park) is the pragmatic but pacifist adult trying to play by the old rules, while Rachel (Mimi Kirkland) is the child young enough to have adapted without question to brutal post-apocalyptic survivalism. As in the last episode, the child's point of view seems to be in the ascendancy. Cyndie's status as an adult and the granddaughter of one of her group's leaders would have made her an undisputed authority figure in the pre-walker world, but when Cyndie and Rachel find Tara (Alanna Masterson) on the beach, Cyndie's humane impulse to spare Tara's life just barely prevails over Rachel's grim insistence on shooting the stranger on sight, as instructed.

Even before everything started to go really wrong for Michael Jackson, Dangerous emerged as something of a harbinger of end times. The official Rolling Stone-canonical version of events holds that the ouster of Jackson's new-jack album from the top of the Billboard charts in favor of Nirvana's Nevermind signaled the unmistakable death knell for the 1980s and the arrival of the '90s. Never mind that both albums were certified blockbusters, as was the release that supplanted Nirvana the very next week: Garth Brooks's Ropin' the Wind. The sense at the time, amid the unprecedented promotional push for Jackson's latest effort and its analogous chart performance, was that the crown was slipping from the king of pop's fingers.

“I pray but I'm lost, am I just praying to silence?” Said words are being used by Paramount to promote the release of Martin Scorsese's Silence, but they could just as easily apply to the filmmaker's drive to get the film made. A two-decades-in-the-making passion project for the auteur, the film is the second adaptation of the Shūsaku Endō novel of the same name, previously adapted in 1971 by Masahiro Shinoda. It relates the story of two Christian missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who venture to Japan, in the ultimate test of faith, to search of their missing mentor (Liam Neeson), at a time when Christianity was outlawed and their presence forbidden.

When I left my apartment in Brooklyn for John F. Kennedy International Airport, late at night on November 8th, neither Hilary Rodham Clinton nor Donald J. Trump had yet secured the 270 electoral votes necessary to be elected the 45th president of the United States. By the time I got through security checks and made it to my gate—where TV screens were broadcasting returns from key battleground states—the race was called. Of course, I needn't hear the result: I saw it on the faces of the people waiting to board, a mix of utter shock and overwhelming concern that the future of our republic would be determined by the most inexperienced, unqualified, and roundly disreputable person to ever hold the highest office.

One of the things that has kept me loyal to The Walking Dead over the years is its matter-of-fact feminism. Some of the best fighters and most strategic thinkers in Rick's (Andrew Lincoln) gender-neutral meritocracy have always been women, and they were usually toughened up by the kinds of trials that all too often turn women into skilled survivors, like the spousal abuse Carol endured or the loss of an adored child that galvanized Michonne (Danai Gurira), a somewhat passive and subordinate housewife, into becoming a latter-day ninja. Even Paula, the Savior who captured and nearly killed Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Carol in season six, gained our respect—and a soul-sister acknowledgement from Carol—for her focused ferocity after we learned that she had been a mousy, abused secretary in the pre-walker world who seized on the apocalypse as her chance to stop eating so much as one more morsel of paternalistic shit, even from her own men.